Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Saint Patrick's Week: The Life of Pie

Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said Tuesday that
the body of Kim Jong Nam, who was killed last month, has been embalmed
to better preserve it, and that about 50 North Koreans whose work
permits have expired will be deported.

News of the deportations was a surprise as the countries have barred
each other’s citizen from leaving amid a diplomatic standoff over Kim’s
death.

If the Malaysians were wise and compassionate, they would renew the visas of these slaves workers and use them for good publicity.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson
faces a tough first trip to Asia this week when the former oil executive
will seek to reassure nervous allies facing North Korea's growing
nuclear and missile threat and press China to do more on perhaps the
most serious security challenge confronting President Donald Trump.

Tillerson will visit Japan and South Korea before heading to
Beijing, where he is expected to firm up a U.S. visit by Chinese
President Xi Jinping next month to meet Trump as the leaders of the
word's two largest economies.

But the chances of Tillerson persuading China to do more to
curb North Korea's weapons programs while in Beijing appear scant, given
China's anger at the deployment of a U.S. anti-missile system in South
Korea last week, and Trump's repeated threats to impose punitive tariffs
on Beijing to correct a large trade imbalance.

Tillerson faces a delicate task in South Korea, which is in
political turmoil after former President Park Geun-hye was ousted last
week in a corruption scandal.

The prospects of a victory by South Korea's liberal opposition
in elections to be held within two months, has raised questions about
the future there of the U.S.-made Terminal High Altitude Area Defense
(THAAD) missile defense system, which China objects to as its radar can
penetrate China’s territory.

Beijing has sought to pressure Seoul to drop THAAD.

Beijing will convince North Korea to behave the way a fly will convince a spider not to consume it.

The First World War was going badly (given the nature of that conflict, that is an understatement). Russia was in the midst of upheaval and Germany was in a stalemate. One way or another, Germany wanted Russia to withdraw.

But don't let Russian Orthodox believers dissuade one from seeing this atheist butcher for what he was and the Russian people's culpability in letting him assume power:

Religious leaders have denounced
Russia's 1917 communist revolution as a “Western plot” to
destroy the country.

The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of
Russia (ROCOR), an autonomous branch of the Russian Orthodox Church, claimed that Russian elites brain-washed by
“Westernism” plunged Russia into political turmoil.

“[Western-educated elites] pushed
Russia into the abyss with suicidal persistence,” the
ROCOR bishops' synod said in a statement. “They persuaded the
Russian people to renounce their faith, their king and their
homeland."

The church also called for the body of
Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin to be removed from Moscow's Red Square
as “a symbol of reconciliation” to mark 100 years since the
revolution.

It said Moscow should be “liberated”
from the body of “the greatest persecutor and tormentor of the
twentieth century.”

The church isn't alone in suspecting the 1917 revolutions were part of a
western plot. In an online poll conducted by Russia's Komsomolkaya
Pravda newspaper, 32.7 percent of respondents said they believed that
Western agents were the main cause of the 1917 February revolution,
which triggered the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II.

Capital gains taxes are imposed on the sale of assets, like stocks
and property other than a principal residence, that have increased in
value in non-registered accounts. Currently, 50 per cent of gains are
included in taxable income, so that the rate is effectively half the
marginal rate. The speculation is that the inclusion might be moved to
75 per cent, resulting in an alarming 50-per-cent increase in the tax
rate. If it were increased instead to two-thirds, that would drive up
the tax by one-third, still a brutal hike.

You would think that a government that professes to be concerned
about the adequacy of retirement savings would avoid discouraging
savings. Yet a capital gains tax does precisely that. The Liberals
clearly prefer government pensions and income supplements to private
savings, the nanny state over the private sector. Furthermore, a capital
gains tax unfairly taxes appreciation resulting from inflation. People
will see their net worth decline in inflation-adjusted terms because of a
government whose profligacy has pushed up prices. Taxing capital gains
also imposes double taxation. Alienating investors and job-creators is
rarely conducive to economic growth.

The Liberal government is earnestly searching for funds for its
ever-escalating social programs and much ballyhooed and elusive
infrastructure spending, much of which has not been for infrastructure
at all. The deficit has almost tripled from the “modest” $10 billion
promised in the election platform. The Finance Department projects
deficits continuing past mid-century, with debt ballooning to $1.5
trillion by 2045. Meanwhile, growth remains modest, in spite of the
stimulus spending. So the minister of finance is in a squeeze and is
looking avariciously at anyone who may want to realize a gain on their
investments.

Fifty-eight per cent of Albertans think the government’s handling of the
economy is “poor” or “very poor,” according to the poll for Postmedia
by Mainstreet Research. The “very poor” category is fully 47 per cent.

Wood, an Arabic-speaking scholar of Islamic history, has spent years
immersed in extended relationships with Islamic State (ISIL) jihadis in
their “diaspora” — places like Egypt, Australia, America, England and
Norway. In this instructive and often entertaining book exploring his
experiences (an elaboration on his feature 2015 Atlantic magazine
article, “What ISIS Really Wants”), Wood shares his impatience with the
ostrich-like approach to contemporary jihadism exemplified in M-103.

Wood writes: “The reality is that the Islamic State (IS) is Islamic.
Very Islamic.” The strain of Salafist Islam jihadists embrace derives
“from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.” Salafis — all
jihadis are Salafist, but not all Salafists are jihadis, who represent,
it bears emphasizing, tens of thousands out of 1.4 billion Muslims —
“read the Koran attentively, and on certain matters, they occupy ground
at least as solid as that of their opponents.” It therefore won’t do, he
says, to pretend jihadists are misrepresenting their religion.

Former Guantanamo Bay inmate Omar Khadr is recovering from a 19-hour
operation on a shoulder that was badly injured in Afghanistan 15 years
ago, his lawyer said Monday.

Putting a bit of perspective on how the government sees useless air-thief Khadr and children with autism:

Fourteen days. A Mississauga family believes if their son was born
just two weeks earlier, he would be getting treatment for autism.
Instead he’s receiving nothing.

Arman Baig turned five on April 28. Exactly two weeks later — after
having to wait six months before he could see a specialist — he was
diagnosed.

The timing is critical; if Arman was diagnosed before his birthday,
he could have been put on a waiting list for Intensive Behavioural
Intervention (IBI). Instead, he was put on a list for Applied Behaviour
Analysis (ABA), a less intensive therapy.

“We were left with no choice. So, he was put on the ABA list,” said
his father, Sajjad Baig. “The wait time for that is at least two to
three years. Now, there is no therapy for him.”

Arman’s parents can’t afford to pay for ABA on their own. His mother
Snovia Jamil said there is no way the family can cover the cost which is
about $3,000 a month.

Doctors at the Necker Children’s Hospital in Paris achieved these
results by first draining the 13-year-old’s bone marrow. They then
“infected” the marrow with a virus containing genetic instructions to
correctly manufacture healthy red blood cells, instead of the deformed
ones that blocked blood flow.

After the insertion of the edited bone marrow into the teenager 15
months ago, the youth was able to stop taking medication and has shown
no symptoms of sickle cell disease since.

Specialists are reluctant to call this procedure a “cure” since more
tests need to be conducted, however the triumph has raised hope for
millions of people suffering from the same disease.

Well-intentioned donor organisations working to assist the disabled
often adopt an approach that is ineffectual in Cambodia, according to
the doctoral research of Cambodian scholar Monyrath Nuth. Based at RMIT University in Australia, Nuth authored an extensive
case study examining whether the “rights-based” approach to disabilities
promoted by international donors is applicable in developing countries
like Cambodia. His research concluded that the situation of disabled
people in the Kingdom was not effectively improved due to the
prioritising of Western concepts of human rights and inclusion.

“This unconscious privileging of Western assumptions embedded in
policy practice resulted in program outcomes that were not sustainable
and produced limited opportunities for Cambodians with disabilities to
thrive,” Nuth wrote, adding that this “thwarted any hope Cambodians with
disabilities may have had for realizing their rights and equality”.

In developed countries such as the United States and Australia, an
approach to disabilities known as the “social model” has been widely
endorsed and adopted. This approach aims to separate the concept of
disability from a person’s physical impairment, and instead focus on
changing the ways relationships and interactions fail to enable the
participation of disabled people in society.

The UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
(CRPD), which came into force in 2008, obliges signatories to adopt this
approach.

But Nuth argues that traditional beliefs in Cambodia are often at odds with this agenda.

For example, religious belief in Cambodia has helped form an
understanding of disability as a limitation to physical or cognitive
functions alone. A longstanding belief that disabilities arise from bad
karma permits people to accept their impairments as fate, and to accept
this as an abnormality.

This belief also obligates family members to
care for their disabled relatives.

Hoping to shield their relatives from shame or judgment, many family
members believe it is immoral to allow disabled relatives to engage in
complex physical activities in public.

“This view contradicts the dominant Western conceptions of social
inclusion that put emphasis on employment and accessibility to all
public spaces as a key aspiration relating to inclusion,” Nuth writes.

Instead of lobbying for accessibility, some Cambodians instead
perform ceremonies for their disabled relatives in order to improve
their karma.

I respect that people draw on faith for comfort and strength but reason helps, too. A disability usually is the result of an injury or illness and should be treated as such, not something to be hidden.

Pope Francis didn’t say that God had told him to revise the Ten
Commandments as claimed in a widely shared story. Francis never made the
purported comments and has not changed or added to the Ten
Commandments. He has no authority to do that, given that the core moral
teachings of Christianity and Judaism were said to have been revealed to
Moses by God and are written in the Bible.

The story said Francis made the announcement July 6, 2015, in
Guayaquil, Ecuador, during his first Mass at the start of a three-nation
South American tour. It said Francis had revised the biblical teaching
to cover children raised by same-sex parents and removed prohibitions on
adultery. It said Francis had added new commandments to forbid genetic
engineering and self-glorification and said the Vatican was having a new
set of commandments etched into marble.

The pope did indeed celebrate his first Mass in Ecuador on July 6,
2015, but his homily focused on the Virgin Mary and the joy of families.
At no time during the trip, or at any other point in his four-year
pontificate, has Francis changed the Ten Commandments.

The story appeared on a site called Real News Right Now, which is
listed on media watch lists as a hoax site. The purported author, R.
Hobbus J.D., is identified on the website as an investigative journalist
who has won awards that don’t exist, including the “Oscar Mayer Award
for Journalistic Excellence.”

Like, say, your birthday. To verify this, we wrote a program to scan the first million digits of Pi
and identify the first instance of all 366 days of the year,
represented like "314," with the month followed by the day ("704" for
July 4th for example, or "1225" for Christmas Day"). The program found
the final date — Dec. 3, or "1203" — beginning at the 60,873rd digit.